fent lean and a fifty nic juul: a trip to vancouver
so, as i mentioned in my last post... i took a short trip to vancouver last week. more for a "why not" sake than anything else in particular. i had a gap in my work schedule and money to spare, which always leads to spontaneous financial decisions. i've never visited another major north american city (is orlando a big city? i stayed in a hotel near university of central florida, but that's about it...). plane tickets were nice a cheap, i think i paid seventy five round trip after using a two hundred dollar flight voucher and that was about it. took a flight at five in the morning, uncomfortably sprawled out in my randomly assigned middle seat, and boom, i was there. it's odd that i can travel four and a half hours and not exit the country, but i go the other way and i'm in a whole separate continent. first time i've experienced it.
to be honest, i found vancouver a bit boring after the second day. i was really tough pressed to find things to do after i exhausted my list of must dos, which consisted of walking a shit-ton and going whale watching. it felt like a smaller version of toronto, with more parks, rain and mountain views. to be quite honest, this is was just toronto, but in a stony peaks/taiga biome. i stayed in a hostel downtown (cheapest rate in the area was fifty five dollars a night) and shared a room with a korean student named minhyeok that arrived a few days before me. i had to search his instagram to remember his name, his bio has 민혁, which i think was his name, i forgot. im sorry... regardless he was a cool dude.
anyways, its always nice to have someone to come back to after a long day. i like being free to do things as they come when i go on trips, and for that reason i avoid inviting people along, but once i come back, its nice to deliberate with someone and shoot shit. with all my hesitation in talking to people, i like meeting people when i go around places. in my eyes, its low risk, either the other party is cool and chill and you hit it off, or you dont and you never see each other again. such is life. i consider myself fairly introverted, but i think in situations like these you really are forced to try a bit. "shared joy is double the joy" or whatever that one pinterest quote floating around in the mainstream nowadays says.
anyways, my four days went a little something like this
day one - may twenty-third
flew in the morning. uneventful flight, but i got to the airport a bit too early and my shirt was showing too much of my collar bone so i switched to a sweater before boarding. arrived at nine in the morning pacific time. took the train to the hostel and somehow managed to get keys to the room and drop my stuff off immediately. took a post flight shower and left before the afternoon began. uneventful morning overall.
after leaving i took a little stroll around the downtown before i set my sights for stanley park. i visited a whole foods for the first time in my life to grab some snacks and went on my merry little way. i spent most of the day walking up and down the park to be quaint. it was a nice sunny day and the temperature was giving what it was supposed to. i can't lie and say i wouldn't be doing the same thing in high park right about then. i walked up the eastern side of the park, then walked down through the trails, then walked up the seawall and back down through a separate trail. stopped a few times to sightsee and take in the sun. after this i was sitting at around thirty thousand steps which is the second time i've hit that amount this summer, so i pushed out another ten thousand steps later at night to get the last badge on samsung health. went to this all hours bakery on the way back then went to sleep at eight. it was a cute day regardless. felt nice to walk around aimlessly and get some good air in.
day two - may twenty-fourth
i woke up at ten, which is very late for me. my roommate was getting ready to leave for the day and we introduced ourselves a bit before he went on his way. i had posted a little instagram story the day before and my coworker from the vancouver office recognized i was in the city so they invited me for lunch. i'm not all too big on seeing coworkers on days im not working (or even thinking about work outside of work hours) but it was a nice gesture regardless. i've only really met them through a screen so it was a bit awkward at first, but then we started talking about our personal style decisions, remembering the talk we had a few months back when i was an intern and had started taking out a few of my piercings infrequently to maintain a "professional" look. we got ramen at a popular lunch spot in davie village.
it rained the rest of the day, so i spent the day reading in another cafe. i finished the first book in the three body problem series and popped by a bookstore in the same area to buy the second book. holy fuck is it a good series. i wont spoil it or talk about it more in this post, but i really really really recommend you read it if you get the chance. came back to the hostel around 8, sat in the common area with the my roommate and another guy in the hostel, good vibes.
day three - may twenty-fifth
very foggy morning. i woke up at nine this time, but i was in headache hell immediately so i went back to sleep for a bit. my ear was hurting really bad too (i think i burst my eardrum a month ago, but i think the weather today was especially poor, causing everything to suck). ate a whole chicken cutlet over rice from dae-ji, i liked it, it was healing. i don't tend to eat very big meals when i'm somewhere new. i have more of a snacking / hopping around attitude. the weather in the afternoon fortunately cleared up, so i went to the capilano suspension bridge in the late afternoon (i think four-ish?). it was fairly crowded, but once i passed over the bridge, it got more spacious and the air wasn't as stuffy. it was very much a touristy thing to do, and i dont regret it, but i miss a time before smartphones. at times, it really ruins the whole vibe of the location when people are solely occupied with taking photos. i've started appreciating taking in sights more and committing them to memory. i still snap and occasional picture or two when i'm out and about to show friends and family, but most of the relevant pictures are in my head.
day four - may twenty-sixth
last full day in vancouver. today was whale watching day. the ferry took off in the morning from granville island so i got the chance to explore a bit afterwards. whale watching was a ten out of ten experience. saw my first ever orca, the ship biologists called him cooper. i also saw a humpback whale called grace. words can't really put into perspective how cool this experience was, seeing such beautiful but extremely complex and intelligent animals so up close. the closest things we have to aliens are marine life, we know so little about them yet we as humans are blips on the timescale of their existence. thinking back to them now i think id probably go to see them again if i was still in vancouver. my new favorite animals, by far...
day five - may twenty-seventh
my flight was at six in the afternoon so i had a fair bit of time to kill. my roommate and i had plans to go visit the cafe like i had mentioned earlier. we were also joined by this very awkward guy who had sent me a match request on hinge after talking to me in the common area of the hostel the night before. (i have a life policy of instantly blocking people who i know in real life, and this was a case of that. i blocked him in the morning after seeing the message). i wasn't the one who invited him along, rather he invited himself and both my roommate and i were too friendly to kick him out. apart from the awkward situation, i tried to make the best out of it. the three of us + another person visited this popular cafe and ended up getting passive aggressively shooed out of the cafe by the owner, who asked us if we were planning on ordering more before pointing to the lineup outside. mind you, this was at ten in the morning on a monday. do these people work? apparently not. the dude had paid for my coffee, which i thought of as a weird attempt to come on to me considering i had explicitly told him no. maybe i'm just a hater, i don't know. flight came pretty fast, sat in the middle seat again and fell asleep immediately.
overall, it was a short but sweet trip. happy i went. would i go again? maybe, depends on the circumstance. probably not recreationally, but i feel like if i find good tickets i would do a similar weekend-ish trip. i would also go if i was richer. maybe i'll start applying to jobs in bc and hope they pay me well enough to afford a shoebox there.